Brett Smitheram has played one Scrabble game against his mother. He was 16 and he won, decisively. ‘She swore she’d never play me again,’ he says. ‘And she hasn’t!’
His mother isn’t being babyish – Cornwall-born Smitheram, now 45, is the UK’s best Scrabble player. When he plays it is, he admits, ‘like having Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on your tug-of-war team’. For the unaware, Johnson is a 6ft 5in former wrestler. Basically, playing Smitheram at Scrabble ‘is not much fun’.
Even if you aren’t competing against The Rock of Scrabble, the game is always emotional. In April, Mattel – the $6 billion-plus company that owns the game – announced the release of a seemingly easier version of it called Scrabble Together. The board looks the same, but rather than playing against each other, you all play against the board itself and are given ‘challenge cards’, with word-related tasks to complete.
It’s the first major update since Alfred Mosher Butts, a Manhattan-based puzzle fan, invented Scrabble in 1938. Mattel calls Scrabble Together ‘inclusive’; fans disagree.
When Gyles Brandreth, president of the Association of British Scrabble Players, told Radio 4’s Today the revamp was because ‘Gen Z people don’t quite like the competitive nature’, host Nick Robinson replied, ‘But losing is how you learn!’ (The BBC later sent a journalist to try Scrabble Together and she concluded that ‘it feels a bit like cheating’. Impartiality rules be damned!)
In America, Fox News despaired that Scrabble was ‘dumbing itself down for the woke’, and an almost existential essay in the Financial Times lamented that ‘we have so few avenues left to us, in this life, for wholesome revenge… Where else, but Scrabble, is there safe space for the true darkness of man’s heart?’
Smitheram – who isn’t affiliated with Mattel – is diplomatic. ‘People remember their grandmother scoring 50 points with ‘xu’ on the triple and winning the Christmas game of Scrabble. And they feel that this is the way everybody else should have to access the game.’
He’s played Scrabble Together once with friends and is unlikely to play again. ‘But that’s not due to the game, that’s due to me.’ (As stated: playing recreational Scrabble with Smitheram isn’t much fun.) Still, he’s clear that Scrabble Together is competitive.
The players are given challenges and ‘if at any point the team member who is on turn doesn’t satisfy one of those challenges, the game ends and your entire team loses. It is brutal. It is sudden death. And, to be honest,’ Smitheram adds, casually and devastatingly, ‘I think people in the UK have played a slightly easy version [of Scrabble] anyway, because the original rules stated: if I play a word, you challenge it and it turns out it’s valid, you, the challenger, lose your go. It’s cut-throat.’
(Of course, most families have their own unique Scrabble rules. The author C S Lewis and his wife would combine two sets of tiles and allow words in five languages – one of which was Chaucerian English.)
Smitheram started Scrabbling as a 16-year-old schoolboy. By 2016, just over two decades later, he’d won the World Scrabble Championship. His vanquishing 176-point word was braconid, which, if you don’t already know, is a type of wasp.
Scrabble doesn’t pay much; Smitheram won £5,873 for the world championship. So he works for a tech startup and plays on the side. He’s ranked third globally now. Number one is a 57-year-old Kiwi, Nigel Richards, who in 2015 won the French-speaking Scrabble world championship without being able to speak the language. He memorised the entire French Scrabble Dictionary in nine weeks beforehand. Pas mal.
Unlike other top Scrabble players – who mostly have mathsy brains – Smitheram is a linguist. ‘I’ll remember the anagram of someone’s name often before I remember their name.’ When I ask if he can make an anagram using the letters of my name he replies, instantly: ‘Maddie with “ie” is an anagram of diadem.’
I’m Maddy with a ‘y’, but nevertheless I’m still impressed.
Smitheram runs Scrabble meetups in London and at a recent gathering a woman in her 60s ‘ran away from me’.
C S Lewis played in five languages, including Chaucerian English
Why? ‘You don’t feel stupid if you lose Monopoly, but Scrabble has something visceral. Scrabble [represents] your vocabulary, your ability to communicate, and when you lose, someone has just shown you that you cannot communicate as well as they can. It’s utterly psychological!’
Why does Smitheram like Scrabble? ‘It’s more complex than chess, because chess only has a certain number of moves. You have 100 tiles in Scrabble that come in any order. Every game is different.
‘I was an introverted kid and [via Scrabble] got to meet people with a common interest and travel all over the world. I flew for the first time – to Australia – for my first world championship. So the very personal answer is, it’s literally changed my life.’